Chillblast Fusion Master Skylake Gaming PC Review

Acoustic, Power & Thermal Performance

Acoustic Performance

Chillblast’s engineers have kept the idle noise to a bare minimum and produces an absolutely wonderful desktop experience. Unfortunately, the fans really ramp up during extreme loads and hit an average of 51.2 decibels. This is too loud for my tastes and I would even tune-in the overclock with a reduce fan profile or add more fans at lower RPM values. The fans are PWM controlled, so this is fairly easy to do.

Power Consumption

As you might expect, the Fusion Master Skylakes 4.6GHz overclock increases the power consumption to 412.3 watts. However, for a top-end gaming system this isn’t a huge amount and testing is conducted under the most overkill of scenarios. Therefore, typical power consumption in games should be reduced.

Thermal Performance

The system’s 4.6GHz overclock has a notable impact on load temperatures but it’s still well within the Skylake thermal limits. Additionally, I love how cool the CPU runs at idle and demonstrates the power efficiency of the i7 6700K. At first glance, the temperatures do look mediocre compared to other systems but this is one of the highest pre-overclocks we’ve seen. On another note, the GPU temperatures are fantastic and didn’t even exceed 65c in demanding graphical benchmarks. As silly as it sounds, the Zotac 980 is only a few degrees hotter than the fairly weak R9 270X.